News alert! “Autobahn” is not the best driving album of all time.  Neu!’s debut album is (half of it, anyway), although nobody knew it, thus the ‘news alert’.

How is it that an album directly responsible for inspiring Kraftwerk’s meisterwork - and released two years before ‘Autobahn’, by ex-Kraftwerk members - has been forgotten? Hell, nobody remembers the band either. If I got turned on to Neu! at an earlier age, I probably would have taken Nat King Cole’s advice a long, long time ago.

Neu!’s first album makes me want to wind along the old Route 66, or head south on Highway 61, or roll past hundreds of miles of Kansas cornfield. It puts the mind in a state of suspended animation, providing a soundtrack for a passing landscape, rural or urban (“Negativland” is perfect for rolling through New York City with the windows rolled up). My only regret is that the best tracks should have been twelve or twenty-four hours long for full impact, but practicality intervenes.

But wait a minute. I’m reviewing the wrong record. The debut is sporadically brilliant, but it lapses into extended moments of weird disconnection, so it’s their 1975 release that I am here to discuss.

It’s funny to say it, but the duo comprising the band actually grew better by growing apart. A few years after their debut, the pair would release an album with a nearly identical cover (with a white on black background in lieu of red on white) called “Neu! (‘75’).

This record found the band split into distinct halves, with one side focusing on atmospherics and the other dedicated to pre-punk experimental song forms. It’s like they each took bits of the debut album and elaborated on the best ideas, coming to completely disparate conclusions. Somehow, the revised results surpass the debut (admittedly an arguable perspective) because the disparate influences are segregated to the point where it sounds like two distinctly different albums sharing the same vinyl.

Side one is the ‘rounder’, impressionistic side, sounding sort of like the aural equivalent of Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’, while side two is angular and expressionistic, suggesting something like de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings. Side one anticipates the melodic synthesizers of Roxy Music, Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark or any of the dozens of other synth-pop duos that dominated ‘80s pop, while side two could be seen as a proto-genesis of punk, over a year before the word was applied to a movement. Both David Bowie and John Lydon point to this record as being extraordinarily influential on their own ideas.

You can’t have a serious discussion about ‘Krautrock’ or electronic music without including Neu! in the dialogue.  They incorporate the spacious geographical expanse of Kraftwerk with the experimental production sense of Can, while conveying a more human, emotional edge that either of those influences could muster. Michael Rother kept the music grounded and melodic one side one while his partner Klaus Dinger added guitars and an edgy vocal delivery to two-thirds of side two. It’s a schizophrenic approach to record making that should play against itself but somehow works. Regardless, both halves are really fascinating, especially if you are coming from an artistic perspective, or willing to drive there.

Featured Tracks:

Isi (phonetically: "Easy")

Seeland ("Sea Land" or "Lake Land"; also the name of various locations - "Neuseeland" is the German name for New Zealand)

Leb' Wohl ("Farewell")

Hero

E. Musik ("Serious Music", a contraction of ernste Musik)

After Eight (Refers to the number "9", in German "neun".)

March 1975 – Billboard Did Not Chart